THE ART WORLD THE JUNKMAN'S SON A Philip Guston retrospective. BY PETER 5CHJELDAHL ');:'.:.:..,'. . .. '\\> . .'"..r '- '1 fI, .::- , '.11 :( g _-.... :t-.w.' 9 '_:.>' .t __ "'I.. '," - _' . c ,-:: , " .. .". , " " . " . .. \!. I ..- - .. .." '\ , '::,- ->.. "' <i;:.. .:,,< ,', . . . "'" '" . '\....., \ .\ ., ..:;;':-'" ,.f: < :...' ) .. JI'r' :õJ!fI'" ". ,'". ) ":o:t %";. (Ii I '\. . \' ..-. .. .., -," .... .................-.--. - -..... ...... - \, '\ . '1.,1 >i' " . ';k '1 " :c. . -' ;.;,"5.. -:1'<0.1. -'..,;'. '. ... "> . -.IT "San Clemente" (1975). Late Guston is one of its era's explosive cultural departures. A round 1967, Philip Guston aban- doned the tremblingly sensitive, lofty Abstract Expressionism for which he was revered. In its place came an out- burst of gross cartoon imagery: gregari- ous Ku Klux Klansmen with fat cigars; one-eyed heads, like lima beans, in need of a shave; interiors ajumble with liquor bottles, cigarettes, food, and painting gear. Guston, who died of a heart attack in 1980, at the age of sixty-six, had seemed the most compunctious member of American art's greatest generation. In- timations of figures sometimes haunted his abstractions, only to be visibly sup- pressed-he was a knight of emotional restraint. When his new wprk was shown in bulk at the Marlboroubh Gallel)) in 1970, it was as though an elegant veil had parted and out had stepped a yak- king geek. I was one of many people 102 THE NEW YOR.KER, NOVEMBER. 3, 2003 who hated the show, and I found my- self half-agreeing with the headline of a famous pan by Hilton Kramer, in the Times: "A MANDARIN PRETENDING TO '''' M d . " d BE A STUMBLEBUM. an ann seeme wrong; a better analogy; for me, wowd have been mountain-dwelling scholar- poet. But the rest fit the masochistic bearing of a style that felt all the more grotesque for being executed with the artist's insinuating brushwork and tick- lish color That moment retains its shock in the current Guston retrospective at the Met- ropolitan. (The show began last spring at the Fort Worth Modern Art Mu- seum.) Reliving it, I understand both why it took me more than a decade to come around to late Guston and why I now regard that work as the most im- portant American painting of its time. The reason in each case is a traumatic upheaval of the nineteen-sixties. Late Guston belongs among other explosive, harsWy significant cwtural departures of the era. Bob Dylan, plugging in an elec- tric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, also abruptly trashed a pre- cious taste with which he had been iden- tified. It seems appropriate that Guston lived in Woodstock, New York, where he had moved in 1947. His breakthrough work in 1967 even seemed to echo "un- derground" comic-book stylists of the day; notably R. Crumb, though evidently he was unaware of them at first. (The resemblance points to shared influences Both Guston and Crumb took inspi- ration from such classic comic strips as George Herriman's "Krazy Kat.") I loved rock-and-roll Dylan, but I clung to a faith in high-toned abstraction as the pinnacle of contemporary art. Gus- ton's 1970 show-in retrospect, modem painting's Appomattox-Ieft me feel- ing betrayed. Guston was born Philip Goldstein to Russian Jewish immigrants in Mon- treal in 1913; he was the youngest of seven children. The family moved to Los Angeles seven years later. Philip drew obsessively; often holed up in a closet with a bare light bwb. (That bwb is a leit- motif in his late work.) When he was ten or eleven years old, he found the dead body of his father, Louis, a black- smith who had been reduced to working as a junkman. Louis had hanged himself. Jackson Pollock was Guston's classmate and best friend in high school. Budding leftists, the two were expelled together for leafletting against the school's em- phasis on sports. Pollock left for New York in 1930, while Guston remained in California, profiting from friendships with cwtivated older artists and intellec- tuals. He acquired his lifelong passion for Old Masters-Piero dell a Francesca was a god to him-and embraced the Depression-era fashion of Social Real- ism. His fascination with the Ku Klux Klan began earl In a drawing that he u made at the age of seventeen, a Klans- man in a group that has lynched a black ::J man fingers a rope Wlth apparent an- 8 guish. Guston said of the K.K.K. fig- ures in his late work, "What wowd it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot." There's a 8 harrowing touch of "Heart of Dark- > ness" -upriver, where the beast thrives-